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Miya Ironami

There is apparently a good effort to add CMYK to Inkscape https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEp-ydPy2EA They also want to allow multiple files to be opened in the same window with tabs, which would be a pretty big quality of life improvement

I'm glad that it seems Inkscape is on a good path to address massive oversights like that. I'll still blame them for not considering this a requirement earlier on. You can't claim to be anything close to a professional vector software if you can't do CMYK. But at least it seems they're rectifying their course. Nice!

8 February at 20:17 | Open on mk.absturztau.be
4 comments
Miya Ironami

But right now, only Scribus has CMYK support. That's publishing software, not vector software, and the CMYK is apparently not very good. There's not really any good free software option for CMYK vector, which is a bit of an embarrassment...

8 February at 20:28 | Open on mk.absturztau.be
greeeeen :blobcatpresentgreen: (christmas edition)

@iro_miya hmmm, how does CMYK even work? like,, to display the image on your screen it has to be converted back to rgb, right?? so if it's that easy to convert back and forth, what's the point of using it anyway?

(i'm not trying to argue, i;m just dumb)

8 February at 20:41 | Open on mk.absturztau.be
Miya Ironami

@green CMYK has fewer colours than RGB and there exist multiple ways of converting between the two colour systems (the reason why is beyond the scope of this post).

You could theoretically store colours in RGB reliably if you could agree to always use the same conversion, but that's just not how it works in the printing sector.

This would be like if you had a list of prices in euros, but you store them in dollars with a note saying that they must be converted to euros with a conversion rate from a specific date.

@green CMYK has fewer colours than RGB and there exist multiple ways of converting between the two colour systems (the reason why is beyond the scope of this post).

You could theoretically store colours in RGB reliably if you could agree to always use the same conversion, but that's just not how it works in the printing sector.

8 February at 20:53 | Open on mk.absturztau.be
Miya Ironami

@green But CMYK also conveys information that is absent in RGB, with the K component.

K stands for black (don't know why). CMYK(0%, 0% 0%, 100%) would look black.

But actually, we can go more black than that.

See, because every ink subtract one another, if you added the other inks, they would make the result even more black. Hypothetically, setting every ink to 100% would look dark as hell... if only printing it were possible!

Maybe you've noticed that a thick ink drop takes forever to dry. This would happen if you had every inks set to 100%. It would smudge all over and be a disaster.

So we can go darker by setting other inks higher, but we can't go too far. Printing companies will tell you what colour you can use to achieve the blackest colour they can print. This is called a "true black". The printing company I'm working with uses CMYK(60%, 40%, 20%, 100%).

So we have CMYK black, which uses only one ink, and true black, which uses every ink.

RGB conveys none of that information! In RGB, there is only one black, it represents an absolute black which is impossible to have in real life.

If you're curious as to why the distinction matters...

Since RGB black is supposed to be an absolute black, most conversion algorithms will try to represent it with a true black. This is why trying to convert RGB(0, 0, 0) will usually not give you CMYK(0, 0, 0, 100%).

This is problematic, because they aren't actually aware of the printer's capabilities

And also because true black is not always what you want. Since you're printing with 4 inks, you need all 4 colours layers to align perfectly in the final product. This is not always the case depending on the printing method.

You might see a little bleed of colour around areas with true black. This is acceptable for large elements, as the bleed will be small in comparison, but it's completely unacceptable for small text, for instance.

@green But CMYK also conveys information that is absent in RGB, with the K component.

K stands for black (don't know why). CMYK(0%, 0% 0%, 100%) would look black.

But actually, we can go more black than that.

8 February at 21:11 | Open on mk.absturztau.be
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